Project Management Flashcards
What is a customer?
- Person who commisions a system; so system must meet their objectives
- Not necessarily the end-user
What is a stake-holder?
- Person with a vested interest in a project
- Potential for conflicts of interest between stakeholders which must be balanced
- Need to manage a stakeholders expectations
What is a developer?
- Required skills: technical, communication and cohesion skills
- Need to manage a fair distribution of the workload
- Need to coordinate workload increments
What needs to be considered when identifying the scope of a project?
- Business context of the project
- System requirements vs Performance constraints
- New build VS Extension
- One off system VS Product line
How do we break down a problem? (Project decomposition)
- Divide & Conquer
- Consider project architecture (its distribution over different systems
When looking at a project, what needs estimating? How?
- [EXACT] costing & time info
- rigourous costing model: COCOMOII
- lightweight costing model: function point analysis
What is the basic idea behind Function Point Analysis?
What are it’s difficulties?
- identify main business functions
- score each function on difficulty of implementation (1 - 3, easy - hard)
- sum function points
- multiply by some constant to determine project size
- hard to pick an accurate constant for projetc size
- developers tend to under-estimate difficulty
How do we select a process model?
- needs to fit the product
- needs to match customer availability
- needs to fit the project environment
How do we follow/use the chosen process model?
- plan a set of stages/deliverables
- modify the process to suit any project constraints
- adapt & improve the process based on experience of past projects
Describe each of the 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model
- Initial: not much of a process model is used
- Repeatable: basic management control, can repeat a level of delivery again
- Defined: process defintion, written guidelines on how to use a process
- Managed: process measurement, measure effectiveness of software engineering process
- Optimising: feedback driven process control
What are the (10) main risks of Project Management?
- Failure to understand the customers needs
- Poorly defined project scope
- Changes poorly managed
- Supporting technology changes
- Changes to the business goals
- Setting unrealisitc deadlines
- Users resistant to the new system
- Losing sponsorship (funding)
- Lack of skilled people in the software team
- Managers & developers don’t use the best practices
What may you have to do if requirements analysis is incorrect? (6 things)
- Modify software specification
- Adapt software design
- Repair the software implementation
- Generate & apply new software tests
- Update the documentation
- Recall the product
Describe a system in terms of subsystems
- System is a complex whole consisting of many subsystems
- Work together to acheive some goal
- Emergent properties of all components working together
- Some form of self-regulating control
What is meant by a system operating in a context?
- Systems are separted from the environment by some boundary
- Has inputs/outputs from/to the environment
Describe a software system in a business context
- Goal is to support a business
- either support core or subsidiary activity
- Need to interact with other physcial or legacy (outdated) systems
